Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo | Hacker News Reader

Female Asian Elephant Calf Born at the Smithsonian National Zoo

si.edu

79 pointsgmays25 comments

Direct source with better readability and many pictures:

https://nationalzoo.si.edu/news/female-asian-elephant-calf-b...

And even more pictures and info on Asian elephants:

https://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/news/get-know-herd-asian-...

> [this individual] will help strengthen the genetic diversity of the Asian elephant population in North America and around the world.

I'm happy for them that there is now a calf after a long time, but this sentence doesn't read as hopeful as the author probably intended

There have been seven Asian elephants born at the St Louis Zoo since 1992.

The key difference is that births like those (and this one) aren't about "we need more elephants," they're about which elephants survive and reproduce

Well, "[Raja] was the first elephant ever born at the Saint Louis Zoo and is considered a St. Louis legend. Male Asian elephant Raja, born amid fanfare nearly 31 years ago on Dec. 27, 1992, has three daughters at the Zoo..."

https://stlzoo.org/news/elephant-news

I do appreciate that they're explicit about why this matters (genetic diversity, SSP, long-term conservation work) instead of just treating it as zoo PR

Everything you listed is zoo PR, just for a different target audience.

(that doesn’t make it bad)

So there are now 55000 and 1 Asian elephants*. I don’t understand the newsworthiness of having an extra Asian elephant joining the other 15000 Asian elephants in captivity.

Wild Asian elephants roam between 100km2 to 1500km2. This elephant will spend a life confined to just how many square km’s?

The conquest for utopian perfection is the enemy of all good things. In the wild she would be poached, hunted and ground dow into medieval medicine, while contained to ever more little islands of wild.

Please god free us from those who want to burn the bakery, because they think tomorrow it will rain manna from the heavens. No curse us greater then a rampant idealist, unwilling to sense reality.

PS: Why not have pragmatic solutions where there are elephant days where the herd to roam in a park?

While I totally agree, the underlying conflict is that Zoos over use the argument of preservation these days. On the other end they certainly have the need to stay entertainment venues, a conflict which they seldomly address.

Recently there was a obviously necessary mass culling of baboons in the Nuremberg zoo which shows some of the controversy [1]

[1] https://www.greenmemag.com/animals/the-nuremberg-zoo-controv...

They could have hunting preserves, basically areas sharedby predators and prey similar to nature as enrichment, but that would be cruelty for the cityZens.

Im argueing against nature preserves in poorer countries, where western nations deluded citizens pay to keep a piece of nature which are basically mirages of "intactness" in economic good times, vanishing from the earth entirely in economic bad times. Which the very same proponents usually argue for with degrowth arguments.

zoos and aquariums serve a very vital purpose. most people only care about these animals because they can go SEE them alive. documentaries help but nothing beats getting a captive people into a room to see a wild animal and then bamboozling them with propaganda about how important it is to preserve these animals. Its the reason we have funding to keep these creatures alive in the wild at all.

if all zoos and aquariums were shut down, public concern about the environment would slowly drift to nothing within 2 generations.

At the same time, I think it's risky to lean too hard on the idea that captivity is the only way to sustain concern

It isn't, but its often been the only reason that a species didn't go extinct.

Pandas being one of those species. I feel as if pandas would go extinct if zoos weren't there.

technically panda's cuteness is the reason why it hasn't really gotten extinct. Dogs/Cats have also mastered the cuteness stat. I wonder if for animals, evolution might now lean towards cuteness.

I am also thinking what counts as cute in the first place? Is there any scientific consensus around cuteness that animals can develop?

Yet framing it as either captivity or guaranteed death is also a bit of a false binary. Zoos are a mitigation strategy, not a moral end state

So it will cost at least 100,000 usd to keep this poor elephant confined in a zoo in the US versus about 15,000 in a wild sanctuary in Thailand.

In the wild sanctuary it will have space to roam.

To be fair, elephant hunting and poaching in India over the last 20 odd years is negligible. I believe it accounts for less than 1% of elephant deaths since 2010.

Zoos are a tradeoff: constrained lives in exchange for research, genetic insurance... And whether that tradeoff is worth it depends entirely on whether the off-site work actually helps wild populations

Every single elephant is precious.

Whenever someone mentions Asian elephants in American zoos, I remember my visit to Columbus zoo, where they treated the Asian elephants like African elephants. Very dry environment, very little water, feeding them dry hay, just absolutely atrocious treatment.

At last someone addresses it

Ssshhh we don't talk about it

There is room for the elephant.

There room in the elephant.

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